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MUSIC; Look What They're Doing to Opera

BAZ LUHRMANN'S hit production of ''La Bohème'' is indeed a lively, stylish and inventive show with a young, sexy and endearing cast. From the perspective of New York theater, it has brought a needed jolt of slightly exotic vitality to Broadway. Watch ''La Bohème'' scoop up Tony Awards for directing, acting and what not. As long as they're at it, why not jiggle the rules and give the best-score award posthumously to Puccini?

Yet from a musical perspective, many veteran opera buffs will be dismayed, as I was, by the compromises the production has made, most grievously in its use of body microphones to amplify the singers and two digital sampling keyboards to fill in the instrumental textures that the meager (for Puccini) 26-piece orchestra leaves blank. Newcomers to opera who think they are experiencing the real thing are not.

For all the dazzle and heart of this Broadway ''Bohème,'' I sat through three shows (to see the three pairs of rotating leads) getting more and more glum about the future of opera. Will traditional companies that play by the rules be able to keep up as the public embraces amplified opera on Broadway?

Opera is a form of musical theater in which music must come first. This means using singers trained in the tradition -- singers whose natural voices can lift those lyrical phrases and make them soar, even at soft volumes. It's almost impossible to convey to those who have never experienced it the sensation of hearing in person a fine operatic voice transported by a lush full orchestra in an acoustically resonant house.

I was 15 when I attended my first ''La Bohème,'' at the Metropolitan Opera, the old Met, on Broadway near Times Square. It was quite the introduction. The incomparable Renata Tebaldi sang Mimi, and the excellent Hungarian tenor Sandor Konya was Rodolfo. To me, Ms. Tebaldi looked like a nice, well-fed Italian lady; Mr. Konya looked like a Budapest businessman in a funny costume. I knew only vaguely what the story was about.

But there was a haunting, plaintive power in Konya's singing. And Tebaldi? I could not believe the sheer presence of that sound, especially the floated high notes, as smooth and creamy as the ice cream she actually ate during the Cafe Momus scene. Her shimmering voice wafted up to my seat in a side balcony and enveloped me in a sound that seemed almost tactile. Suddenly, those two middle-aged people onstage became the essence of bittersweet youth and headlong passion.

The amplification of ''La Bohème'' at the Broadway Theater is far more subtle than the blasting sound systems so common at musicals these days. Still, the actual voices are flattened into an amplified wall of sound, and the spatial element of operatic singing, with voices coming from different locations on the stage, is completely undermined. It's sometimes difficult, especially in the crowd scenes, to tell who is singing without checking to see whose lips are moving. And the voices are thrust at you, even those of the milk maids who, as they pass the city gates in Act III, sing a wistful little tune that is supposed to be subdued and gentle.

Moreover, rather than giving a boost to these young voices, the amplification only magnifies every technical shortcoming: unsteady pitch, vocal tightness, patchy legato, pressed pianissimo high notes. Surely the voice of the coloratura soprano Jessica Comeau, a brazen Musetta with blazing red hair, would not sound so shrill if the microphones were turned off.

Mr. Luhrmann searched the world, he has said, to find well-trained and attractive young singers, and several leads have solid credentials. But operatic voices take a long while to develop, and singers in their 20's, like these, are at a crucial stage. Each Mimi and each Rodolfo must sing the role three times a week, a wearing schedule for a green voice. And by singing into a body microphone, these singers are undermining every technical principle they have been taught. Moreover, the orchestra, with its sampled extra winds, horns and strings, sounds a scrawny facsimile of a full orchestra.

Attending these performances got me upset all over again with the New York City Opera for installing an amplification system in the acoustically challenged New York State Theater in 1999. To be fair, this device, euphemistically called a ''sound enhancement'' system, works not at all like standard amplification. Instead, dozens of small microphones pick up ambient sound onstage and transmit it to hundreds of tiny speakers on the side and back walls of the theater. Defenders argue that the technology enhances the acoustics of the hall, not the volume of the voices. Its effect, though audible, is subtle.

Still, the amplification represented a crossing of the line by a major company. Before, to a generation raised on hard rock and Surroundsound, the world of opera and classical music could always say, ''Come to our opera houses and concert halls, the last bastions of unamplified sound, and hear beautiful natural voices and reverberant traditional orchestras.'' Now, Broadway can point to the City Opera (and other companies that utilize various sound enhancement systems, among them the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Houston Grand Opera) and say, ''Aha, you're not so pure.''

Abandoning natural sound will alter the nature of opera and classical music as surely as the introduction of amplification into Broadway theaters, starting in the late 1950's, sabotaged the literate, urbane genre of the American musical, ringing in the era of schlock spectacles.

So why are Mr. Luhrmann and Constantine Kitsopoulos, who conducts ''La Bohème,'' making these major musical compromises? Mr. Luhrmann wanted to take this work back to the broad audience for whom it was written, to make Puccini's beloved 1896 opera as startling as it was when new. To reveal the work as an involving drama with contemporary resonance, and to lure in mainstream audiences, he decided to cast it with quite young singers who looked and acted like the dynamic characters they were portraying -- for example, Ekaterina Solovyeva, a lanky blond Mimi from Russia, and Wei Huang, a rosy and vulnerable Mimi from China. Ben Davis, a baritone who sings Marcello, would fit right into the cast of ''Dawson's Creek.'' David Miller, a tall, fair, Colorado-born tenor, one of the Rodolfos, could be a Tommy Hilfiger model.

The operating assumption of this approach is that opera remains an anachronistic performing art, in which tubby singers who can hardly move portray young heroes and tubercular heroines. Even in Ms. Tebaldi's day, this was an unfair generalization. The visual component of opera has increased in importance since the late 1970's, when live television broadcasts from the Met started attracting millions of viewers. Today, opera houses routinely recruit bold directors from theater and film (like Mr. Luhrmann), and many younger singers are as beholden to personal trainers as to vocal coaches.

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The baritone Nathan Gunn has a robust voice as well as a keen musical intelligence, not to mention a hunky physique. Last year, in the title role of a riveting production of Britten's ''Billy Budd'' at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, barefoot and often shirtless, Mr. Gunn climbed rigging, staved off fights with other sailors and sang the role poignantly, fully conveying Billy's winsome and, in the end, fatal innocence. Denyce Graves is not only a mellow-voiced mezzo-soprano but also a glamorous African-American woman who need do very little to convey the sultry sensuality of Carmen and Delila. The elegant British baritone Simon Keenlyside is the Ralph Fiennes of opera, not just an affectingly restrained actor, but, as his recent Lincoln Center performances in the choreographer Trisha Brown's staging of Schubert's song cycle ''Winterreise'' made clear, an agile dancer. In roles like Strauss's Marschallin and Mozart's Countess, the exquisite soprano Renée Fleming has proven herself a sensitive, vulnerable and lovely actress with the fleshy beauty of an Ingrid Bergman or a Jessica Lange.

But vocal authority accounts for a lot in operatic acting. When Plácido Domingo sings Parsifal at the Met later this season, don't expect him to wear a wig or dye his gray hair to portray Wagner's pure young fool made wise through pity. Instead, he takes you to the core of this character through gravitas, conviction and the power and beauty of his singing.

In casting ''La Bohème'' with young, attractive singers, updating the story to the 1950's and treating the opera as a vividly resonant theatrical work, Mr. Luhrmann is not as radical as he may think. I've seen lots of young, appealing and well-directed casts in ''La Bohème.'' I remember a wonderful production at the Opera Company of Boston some 20 years ago, conducted and directed by Sarah Caldwell. Her Mimi was Sarah Reese, a rich-voiced black American soprano. A tenor born in the Philippines, Noel Velasco, sang Rodolfo. She was sweet-faced but a little frumpy; he was short and skinny with a shock of black hair. But these unlikely lovers seemed just the sort of couple who really would have fallen in love on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1830's. And they sang beautifully.

By the way, Mr. Luhrmann, who asserts that intense research goes into his staging concepts, must know that in the serialized novel that was the basis for the ''La Bohème'' libretto, Henri Murger describes the real-life character who was his model for Rodolfo as quite bald. In another production of the opera, Ms. Caldwell cast the role with a prematurely bald and bearded young tenor, who made a lanky and engaging bohemian poet and lover.

I was also moved by a ''La Bohème'' at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, performed in English translation to make it more immediate. The cast had an appropriately hungry look that was based, I bet, on reality, knowing the kind of schedules most conservatory students maintain. Here were adorable young singers realizing their fantasies, filling Puccini's famous melodies with their voices and sending them out over the student orchestra into the hall. The musical integrity of the production was key to its dramatic impact.

Mr. Luhrmann, claiming authenticity, presents ''La Bohème'' in the original Italian, though with freely translated, and rather sassy, supertitles. The Italian is inherent and fundamental to the music, he says. Fair enough. Yet, in fact, when ''La Bohème'' was new and was produced in England, France, Croatia or wherever, it was almost always translated into the native language of the audience. This was standard practice, and Puccini embraced it. The popularity of supertitles has been undermining the honored tradition of performing opera in translation. Mr. Luhrmann's production might have been an ideal occasion to revive it. In any event, any director who sanctions the use of amplification and digital keyboards should be careful about claiming the mantle of authenticity.

The performance clocks in at a swift 2 hours 15 minutes. Mr. Kitsopoulos, the conductor, was influenced by a fleetly paced 1946 live recording by Toscanini, who had conducted the opera's premiere 50 years earlier. Mr. Kitsopoulos, however, prefers to think that he is ''taking Puccini's tempos,'' as he told the press. Well, there is another historic recording of ''La Bohème,'' this one conducted in 1956 by Sir Thomas Beecham, who had worked closely with Puccini in preparing a 1920 production in London. Though buoyant, Beecham's performance is much more leisurely. Go figure. I admire both. But Mr. Kitsopoulos, who is presiding over an amplified cast and partly electronic orchestra, should stop invoking Puccini's blessing for his swift tempos, which sometimes muddy details and leave the chorus scrambling.

Just as there are things to be learned when a musical like Stephen Sondheim's ''Little Night Music'' or Frank Loesser's ''Most Happy Fella'' is performed by an opera company, there are lessons to take from the Broadway ''Bohème.'' If this hip and youthful production entices opera neophytes into the opera house, then great. My fear is that it will just lead to calls for more amplified opera on Broadway: Baz Luhrmann's ''Nozze di Figaro,'' Steven Soderbergh's ''Carmen,'' Martin Scorsese's ''Rigoletto.''

Mr. Luhrmann's production certainly provides an important challenge to repertory companies like the Met to avoid routine with repertory works. When the Met puts its full resources into a new production, enthralling musical drama is often the result, like last year's magical new production of Strauss's ''Frau Ohne Schatten,'' and the revival, just opened, of Poulenc's ''Dialogues des Carmelites,'' beautifully sung and affectingly acted. But with a work like ''La Bohème'' in Franco Zeffirelli's grand and hugely popular production, it's easy for the Met to slip into automatic pilot and just keep bringing it back with rotating cast members who, however youthful, nimble and talented, sometimes seem as if they are directing themselves. (It must be remembered, of course, that the Met puts on some 25 productions a year.)

If amplification keeps encroaching on opera, the day may come when the Met will make a selling point of being among the handful of houses left where voices can be heard in natural acoustics. But will the voices be there?

Last year, a dashing young 24-year-old tenor from Texas, Jesús Garcia, was a winner of the Met's National Council Auditions. At the finalists' concert, with full orchestra at the opera house, Mr. Garcia won over the audience with his ardent singing of two arias. His voice was not big, but his heart was. In time, with care and training, I thought, he'll gain power and have a nice career.

Well, Mr. Garcia's voice has gained more power, though perhaps wattage is the right word, since he is one of Baz Luhrmann's Rodolfo's. No matter. He is already talking about seeking a future in the entertainment industry.